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Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this more like "Lego" for hardware?

In MacPaint I can paint anything. In your toolbox I can only assemble something with the parts that you give me.

The MacPaint analogy would hold water if you'd let me draw any shape that I want (to be 3d printed), and merely assist by enforcing the basic constraints required for my device to be manufactured and functional (e.g. enough space to put the electronics in, etc.).

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To be fair, there were many constraints in MacPaint - color being the most obvious example. It was a limited drawing program. Put into context, I do believe the analogy works - you start simple (box, few components, limited layout) and evolve to include malleable 3D printed materials and generated electronics.

Disclosure - I wrote the post.

Quick question, perhaps: what's the maximum computing power, especially RAM, you're thinking of offering?

If it's just microcontrollers, my interest in somewhat limited. Something I reasonably put a Lisp on (code as data wants RAM, even if a lot can live on flash) ... well, looking at Wikipedia's list of Arduino CPUs, 96KiB is a very qualified maybe, 64MiB is a lot more like it.

I think it's a bit looser of analogy, where MacPaint was one of the first desktop computing apps people saw and immediately realized how much better than the old command line tools something could be. Word processors, spreadsheets, etc. worked fine with all text but MacPaint was truly special and couldn't be replicated without a full desktop environment. From what I gather in the article they want to do something similar where they build a product that makes people realize 'oh so THAT's what I can do with all this Arduino, Raspberry Pi, 3D printing, etc. tech!'

The mouse was a must for MacPaint, but it didn't run in a 'full desktop environment' at all. It blitted something looking like a window onto the screen. If it used the OS for doing that, that only was because it took up less memory that way, not because it wanted to behave like it ran on a desktop environment.

Did it have movable windows? No.

Did it have resizable windows? No.

Could you move the tool palette around? No.

Could you open multiple windows? No (no surprise, given that a full-page painting took a whopping 28kB or so and the OS didn't really have enough RAM to store that.)

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